cash

If you’ve ever wondered how your peers seem to afford things that are out of your financial reach, the answer might surprise you. While some might pay for that new smartphone or vehicle through a secret second job or savvy saving practices, many people utilize credit to finance luxury purchases. While the majority of national household debt is comprised of home mortgages, a significant and rising percentage is made up of car loans and credit card purchases.

Credit Cards Make Spending Easy

The widespread use of credit cards can be attributed to how easy they are to use. Instead of having to carry multiple bills or coins, you can leave home with a single sliver of plastic. And monthly statements available online theoretically make tracking spending much easier than keeping a personal itemized list.

But the convenience of credit cards comes at a price. Studies show that people, even typically frugal ones, tend to spend more when using cards rather than cash. Unlike credit cards, debit cards deduct money from your account immediately. However, psychologically, it’s still much easier to thoughtlessly swipe that piece of plastic as opposed to handing over your hard-earned paper.

Even the usefulness of that monthly statement can be deceptive, as it will tell you when and where you spent your money, but won’t reveal what exactly you bought at that location and how you spend your money.

Cash Can Keep Spending in Check

Carrying cash instead of a credit card limits your spending to whatever you can buy with what’s in your wallet or can take out of an ATM. Instead of comparing numbers on a monthly statement, you can see your available resources in front of your eyes, giving you an immediate sense of what you can and can’t afford.

The greatest benefit of using cash over credit is avoiding debt. While many people rationalize their large, non-essential purchases by telling themselves that they’ll pay them off later, debt can quickly spiral out of control and take a toll financially and emotionally. Restricting your spending to cash eliminates this problem, as you can’t spend what you don’t have.

Make cash more convenient for you and your customers with Merchant 365. Visit https://www.merchant365.ca/ or call 780-909-5539 for all your ATM placement and service needs!

Many things go into planning a fair, festival or another special event; from finding the right location and obtaining the necessary permits to hiring vendors and actually getting people to come. One other thing you’ll definitely want to consider for your event is an ATM rental, as it’s an easy way to ensure that your event is more profitable for everyone involved. You may ask why?

You’ll obviously want to encourage people to spend as much money as possible at your event. Therefore, it only makes sense to have an ATM or two onsite since this will ensure that people have easy access to cash.

Truth is most people go to festivals and other special events prepared to spend money, often much more than they would ever consider spending on a typical night out. In fact, people will often spend so freely that they run out of cash. Unfortunately, many event vendors are unable or unwilling to accept credit card payments, which means everyone involved is potentially missing out on profits.This is obviously where an ATM rental can come in handy. In many cases, having an ATM nearby will actually encourage people to spend more money. Better still, statistics show that people who take out money at special events tend to end up spending everything they take out at the event. In this way, having easy access to cash, all attendees will have a positive experience, especially those who forgot to bring cash with them.

All of these factors point to an ATM rental being one of the smartest decisions you can make in regards to planning your event. Ensuring attendees have access to cash will help make them and all of the vendors much happier and more satisfied in the long run. Best of all, the process couldn’t be simpler. All you need to do is rent an ATM from Merchant365 for your event and see a dramatic increase in profits.

In this age of high-tech payment methods, most businesses will happily accept a good old dollar bill. Your small business should encourage customers to use cash. It is a simple payment that is cheaper and more secure than credit and debit cards. Your business and your customers both benefit when you work with paper money.

According to data from Intuit, around 55 percent of small businesses don’t accept credit cards. Another survey found that 72 percent of business owners don’t prefer credit card payments, and there are many reasons for this. Paying with plastic makes things more complicated for shopkeepers. It requires more bookkeeping, and you have to wait a few days for your money. Plastic also requires slow machines, which have gotten even slower since banks introduced the new chip-enabled cards.

Paper money is also more secure. Yes, you can lose it, but it can’t get hacked like a credit card system. You don’t want to end up like Home Depot, a company that lost $10 billion thanks to criminals hacking into their transactions data in 2014. Credit card machines are also vulnerable to crashes. This is a lesson that shopkeepers in the UK learned the hard way on Valentine’s Day in 2015. On that day, businesses lost thousands of sales because card systems went down.

Accepting card payments also costs your small business money. When your customers pay you with dollar bills, you don’t owe any fees to a third party. Compare that with the cut from each sale that credit card companies take. These fees average around 2% for MasterCard, Visa, and Discover. American Express takes an average of 3%. All cards charge a flat 20 to 30 cent fee per transaction on top of these percentages.

Your customers also benefit when you encourage cash payments. A study by Allpoint found that 49% of consumers said they paid with dollar bills last year, while 43% said they used cards. Most of your potential customers simply prefer paper over plastic, but some don’t have a choice. When your business is dollar bill friendly, consumers without traditional bank accounts can buy your goods and services.

Putting an ATM in your small business is a good way to encourage your customers to pay with paper. At Merchant365, we have placed many money machines in businesses across Western Canada. Our ATMs are reliable and we offer 24/7 technical support to our clients. Contact us today for more information about how an ATM from Merchant365 can help your business gain all the benefits of cash.